The Killing Type (13 page)

“I’m having some difficulty fathoming
exactly what you are suggesting,” I say diplomatically, trying to
avoid the tone I might use with, say, a child who had just told me
about a monster in her bedroom. “You’re not saying that the police
and the—the mayor and—what are you saying, exactly?” I am
experiencing genuine difficulty framing my response as part of a
conversation that adults might be having.

“No, of course not, I’m not
saying that they’re all
in on
it
, or anything like that.” She seems
slightly angry. “I mean, I’m not implying that they’re sitting
around in city hall hashing out who’s going to get whacked next and
who they should hire to do it.” She laughs now, and I take some
relief in that.

“So …?” I prod.

“I guess my main point is that it’s in
the interest of many police and civic officials to let this drag on
a bit. Not that they’re killing, of course, but that maybe they
aren’t trying their hardest to track the guy down. All these people
murdered, some of them in pretty horrific ways, and they don’t even
have a lead or a suspect or anything? It boggles the mind. The
longer it goes and there is nobody caught, the more money that gets
added to their law-and-order budget or whatever.”

Though this more nuanced assessment is
several degrees superior to what I had suspected, I still remain
flummoxed at the relative simplemindedness of her analysis. Yes,
the facts are as she says they are, but I am not cynical enough,
perhaps, to reduce this mess to a merely financial rationale. I see
incompetence and a lack of drive in the police and in the general
coordination of the “investigation” (one hesitates even to grace it
with this word), but nothing more sinister than that.

“I’m not sure I agree,” I
say rather hesitantly. “The most I would say is that it
might
be as you say, but
only unconsciously.”

“Yes, maybe you have a
point. In fact, I hope that you
are
right, because even the hint of what I am
suggesting makes me very worried and depressed.”

There’s a loud thudding sound which
startles us both, and when we turn around to look at its source
within the barricade there is another, though more muted. We get up
immediately and run toward the vehicles, Tony ahead of me at a good
clip and me, alas, lagging and panting. I see flames and shout that
fact to her and she adjusts her trajectory to head in that
direction.

Tony arrives and I pull up behind her
about five seconds later. I can feel the heat from a small fire,
but most noticeable is the panicked shouting on the part of several
of the media people within the barricade.

“What the fuckin
fuck
?” I hear, the
strictured eloquence not really boding well for the future of
informed, articulate reporting in this town.

Tony, ever the bold charmer, goes over
to one of the reporters who is standing to the side observing the
melee. I run up behind her, staying close enough to hear the
conversation but far enough away so as not to spook the
reporter.

“So, what gives?” she says.

“It’s nothing really,” says the
reporter, evidently more interested in the territory of Tony’s
physique than in prosaic explosions. “Someone dropped a match into
a chemical or something that one of the women was using for her
hair, I think. Or maybe it was one of the men.” He laughs and so
does Tony.

“What the hell could go
in
anyone’s
hair
that would be that explosive?”

“That’s just one of the stories. I’ve
also heard that there was a fight between one of the male reporters
and his camerawoman. He claimed she shot him in bad light or
something and made him look bad on camera. She said—well, I’ve
heard it quoted like, ‘I didn’t have much to work with.’ And then
he apparently threw something at her, which ended up in a vat of
something. The details are a little fuzzy, and who knows what’s the
truth anyway?”

Tony turns away to rejoin me and I can
see that the reporter is interested in her departing assets as
well. Quite disgusting.

“Did you catch that?” she
asks.

I sigh in response and we both head
away from the barricade as we hear the sirens of the firetrucks
making their way closer.

Chapter 14

Yet another body, yet another
convulsion of rage against the ineffectual police.

A woman is thrown off a highrise,
thirteen unlucky storeys to her death. The pedestrian who
discovered her was rushing home to his wife, and was not used to
being out this late. He feared that she would suspect him of
infidelity (the things that people will admit to newspaper
reporters!), when the real cause was that he had met an old
high-school friend and they had drunk at the bars until they closed
down and then went to a party of a friend of a friend
where—

Anyway, he had just checked his watch
(3:39 am) when he heard a sound behind him, “sort of a clapping
sound,” as he described it to the radio reporter, “but also kind of
like a thud, too.” He stopped, stared at the woman now splayed face
down on the sidewalk, and didn’t immediately make the connection
that she had gotten there from above. When he did, he backed away,
sat on a bench on the street, and called 911.

The town is scared and
sympathetic at first. Flowers, stuffed animals, candles,
handwritten messages, poems, Bibles,
billets doux
, all appear at the site
of the fall after the police have cleared the scene. I watch it on
the news first. One of the reporters, from the channel that likes
to highlight the human element of all stories, crouches in front of
the mass of gifts and wishes, and then actually picks up one of the
teddy bears and brandishes it in front of the camera, looks down at
it as if to glean some explanation for the senseless crime, and
then into the camera again, and signs off. I am nearly apoplectic
with disbelief, seeing such exploitation, seeing such a
desecration.

The next day I visit the site myself.
The pile of things, mostly pinks and blues, is even bigger, and I
just stand off to the side for about fifteen minutes, watching more
and more people bring even more things, people standing silently
not unlike myself, people crying. A woman in her 20s, wearing
horn-rimmed glasses and a short black dress, walks up to within
inches of the edge of the pile, and then removes a small light-blue
box from her purse. She looks at it for a moment, then presses it
to her lips, and as a tear rolls down her cheek she bends down
slowly and places the box in amidst the rest of the things.
Standing again, she wipes her tears, then pinches the top of her
nose, the thumb and index finger of her left hand on either side
and nearly protruding into her eyes. Her head is bowed and she
maintains that pose, almost completely stationary, for a solid
minute, while cars buzz by her and other people walk up to the
shrine as well, most of them pausing to look at her after they have
dropped off their own bit of sympathy.

Three days later there is a
demonstration in front of city hall on Saturday, waves of people
with placards who make their way to the police headquarters. I have
trouble knowing whom to support: perhaps such a balance of mind,
such equanimity, on my part is the result of having spent so much
time in academic research, for which an ability to sift through
evidence is much more valuable than making facile accusations. I
estimate that there must be a couple of thousand people cramming
the streets. A chant starts—“Arrests now! Arrests now! Arrests
now!”—but eventually subsides. A man dressed in wrinkly linen heads
to a makeshift podium set up at the bottom of the steps leading to
city hall, squints and starts back a bit at the squelch of
microphone feedback, and finally addresses the now silent
crowd.

“People, thank you for
coming out this afternoon.” There are a few shouts and some
applause, and then silence again. “Thank you for being part of this
citizens’ protest against a lack of action on the part of the
police and the politicians to get something done about this ...
about this
atrocious
series of crimes in our beautiful city. Let me tell you some
of the things that our community action committee has done
to—”

While the speech drags on,
a little too long if I may say so, I do marvel at the power of
democracy, as naive and simple-minded as that might sound. Crimes
are committed and the law-enforcement institution which has been
charged with discovering the criminals has not been effective:
whether or not it has
tried
to do its job—and I suppose that to be generous
one must assume so—it has not been successful. Victims continue to
pile up and a murderer is on the loose. The people rise up. Demand
action. Threaten, or imply, that they will take the law into their
own hands if there are no results.

“—
no results we will do our
own damn investigating, and
find this
killer ourselves
!”

This last bit is fairly shouted into
the microphone and there is distortion on the last syllable but the
message is clear. The crowd roars, hands in the air, a chant
started (I cannot make out the words) and then abandoned, and at
first there is confusion. Finally, a rough choreography is
initiated and a woman with a megaphone at one corner of the crowd,
farthest away from the man at the mike, speaks.

“People, people. We are going to march
down King Street and then circle back here for our last rally.
There are colleagues in red and white jackets to the left and right
of me, and in front of me. They are going to lead the walk, and
we’re going to start right now. Please follow them. We don’t want
this to be violent or anything like that; we don’t want a riot. We
just want to show the police that there is a big problem
here.”

With that there is a cheer and the
march sets itself in motion in an admirably orderly fashion. I am
torn about whether to proceed with the crowd, perhaps cozy up to an
activist and match him stride for stride with question after
question, or to sit here on the steps of city hall, reflect on what
I have seen, and await the return of the protestors. I do stand
there for about five minutes as they all clear out and round the
turn onto William Street, but I ultimately feel the monster fatigue
in me, and I decide to head off.

The dead woman, the latest cause of
all this uproar, is Pamela Yang, and all I can think of as I walk
away and head home is that this feels like such a vibrant name. I
reach my room and just plop down onto the little red sofa,
slouching, back arched unhealthily. I resent the sounds I hear
outside: it is not noisy, but even the occasional car horn, someone
talking to someone else, “so the brakes never need to be fixed
again,” someone else laughing—everything makes me want nothing but
the perfection of silence. I am a little disgusted at my own
practicality as well, because at the same time that I am to some
extent at least grieving a senseless death (number whatever-it-is)
I am also making mental notes about details, things that would not
exploit the victim but that would entice (vile, wrong word)
readers. Pamela face down, that sound the pedestrian
heard.

I cannot relax at all, and I get up
again and head out to the pub, where unfortunately I meet the
raver. My mind is swimming with details and, unfortunately, I
haven’t noticed him come into the room. He’s in mid-sentence by the
time he sits down next to me.

“... what they’re doing anyway, so I
say let’s go house to fucking house and give a lie detector or look
for evidence or whatever until we find this prick.”

I consider my options in
this situation, and none of them is very appealing. For the
briefest of fantasy moments, I doff an imaginary Sherlock Holmes
hat and start puffing on one of those silly pipes and silently
pronounce the raver himself as the murderer. The guise, the ruse,
is brilliant: what better way to distract attention from yourself
than to seem to be
attracting
attention? I’m reminded of the parade of bullies I
barely endured in high school, dumb brutes who appeared to revel in
self-confidence but whose facades came tumbling down in various
circumstances, typically when they were genuinely challenged or
when you met them alone and could reason with them without the
posturing.

There are exactly seven people in the
room other than myself and the bartender. They are all as tarred
with guilt as the raver is. That’s not a pool cue I see but a
rifle, the safety on for now but his thumb sliding slyly and
dangerously close when he makes the nine in the side. That knife of
a swizzle stick is not much good for stirring but I can see from
the look in his cloudy eyes that he’s aching to wield it, do his
best with the gin and tonic and then go slashing.

Or maybe it’s the whole
room, a murder for each pair of people so far for all but one of
them—and who would that be? Who has that shifty look, those
shuffling feet, that anxious tension that betrays itself in nervous
laughter and brooding silences? Not the guy in the red and black
lumberjack shirt. Not the guy pretending to watch television. Not
the—yes, it’s
him
,
it’s the accountant with the cheap scuffed-up briefcase, the shabby
shiny dark blue suit whose pants are lighter than the jacket
because they’ve been washed more than it has been drycleaned. And
there’s that telltale ring around the collar of a shirt that used
to be pristine white but now is
off
, as they say, off white. I see him
counting up victims on stubby little fingers, the tally running
through the total permitted by two hands and forcing him to start
over, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and then that sly evil hint of a
smile of anticipation when he realizes that it’s his turn now with
the fourteenth.